Lesbian Bed Death, as I’m sure you know, is the idea that lesbians in long-term relationships have less sex than straight couples in longterm relationships. Some of our staff have experienced it and some of our staff think it’s a hoax and some of our staff think it’s a hex. We can’t know for sure what the deal is with it because The L Word waffled on its definition and depiction of bed death, and how else are we supposed to understand fighting, fucking, crying, cheating, etc. if not with the help of Bette and Tina?
In this week’s Monday Roundtable, we’re taking things to the A+ place and asking our writers and editors: Have you ever experienced bed death in your relationship? If you did move past it, how? Has bed death ever signaled the end of a relationship for you? Has a fear of bed death ever made an impact on your relationships? Do you think bed death isn’t a big deal and we should stop talking about it?
I really enjoyed what Sarah had to say
Thanks for the links too
Thanks all, this is so good. Thanks for being so open and honest and providing so much to think about.
Thank you all for your openness and honesty.
Sarah, what you wrote especially resonated with me and was so incredibly helpful in so many ways.
I think that my girlfriend and I are both a little worried that what has kept our sex life so great for so long is that we have been long distance so there’s an excitement in getting it in when we can see each other. That long distance ends in 23 days and I’m so excited but also scared. Scared that the slightly mismatch in our libidos will become more glaring (thank you also Carmen for what you said about that). Scared that we will still be affectionate but not in a sexual way (ding ding Sarah). after reading these answers I’m more motivated to talk about these anxieties preemptively and not wait for it to be fine or not fine. Thanks!
Ok so I came here half hoping to learn the real reason that LBD and libido have the same consonants in the same order. Instead I found much affirmation and truth and nice things to think about – THANK YOU!!! Especially for the wide diversity of answers.
I recommend talking early and often about sex with your partner, very very often. My first convo with my ex about her diminished sex drive was actually a relief to me because it seemed we were becoming more in sync – because of childhood trauma, sex was/probably-still-is a bit overwhelming for me. But then… 18 years later, we revisited that conversation, and it was very _very_ different. Turns out it had more to do with her desire for me being diminished, not her desire in general. Ouch.
So take note : don’t do what I did and wait so long to talk about it again.
And, if depression has invited itself to the party, and the depressed person refuses therapy, it will bugger things up so completely that it will be impossible to distinguish any kind of truth about how you feel towards each other, sexually or emotionally. I’m sorry I didn’t know any better to help her get help.
I don’t regret taking care of her while she was sick for so long because kindness, caring deeply for someone etc., but I do feel that all those years went by and I’ll never get them back. What would I have done if I’d known the truth from the get-go ? I marvel that I was able to live a chaste relationship for so long without exploding, how on earth did I manage that, who the heck am I ?? Thank g_d the asexuals got busy while I was in deep-freeze, describing and cataloguing every nuance of sexual/non-sexual expression. I’m now working on finding therapy, but there don’t seem to be many therapists out there who are hep to all this. Perseverance furthers, they say.
This is great! Thank you all for your smart and honest takes!
I still don’t know if I think LBD is real or not, because each time someone took a strong take for or against in this roundtable, I was nodding along all excitedly. But I agree that the term sounds unnecessarily intense (laughed out loud at Riese’s “I mean, DEATH!!!??!!”) and has patriarchal/male-centered connotations to me. Mostly, I agree with everyone that communication is key — in my experience, it’s the weird not talking about it that makes you feel awful (whether it’s been like 2 weeks or 2 months or whatever without sex), way more than the amount/frequency itself. I’ve had fairly short-term relationships that felt bed-death-y because we always relied on the sudden urge (read: drunkenness) and were never quite on the same page and just never ever talked about it, whereas longer-term relationships that have involved talking (and planning/scheduling) have fared much better. I also find that, the longer a relationship goes, the more I value quality over quantity, you know? Like yeah, sometimes the only time your schedules align between travel/periods/sicknesses etc is like a Tuesday night at 11 pm and you kinda just have to suck it up, but in general I now much prefer bracketing out a slow long fun weekend afternoon. Maybe that’s just getting older too?
it’s so comforting to know so many of us are so irritated by the idea that “bed death” is coded as a specifically lesbian thing! honestly, WHO THE FUCK CAME UP WITH THAT I’M MAD AND I WANNA YELL AT THEM.
also — haha, i forgot i wrote this. that was neat, reading these words i tipsily wrote a few weeks ago. oops!
also also — sarah. oof. i love you. thank you.
<3
this is really interesting to read as an a-spec person!
in terms of lbd like, definitionally, i think the statistics riese brought up are interesting, but i also definitely agree that the term seems rooted in misogyny and homomisia! it also sounds very, uh, fatal? like once the bed is ‘dead’, there’s nothing to salvage? which i’m not into.
this whole thing was great but i especially appreciated what vanessa and carmen had to say. i also really relate to reneice’s fear, but i guess from the other side of the coin! i’m still figuring out where i’m at with sex but so far the experiences i’ve had i haven’t enjoyed at all, and that increasing the probability of rejection kind of stresses me out a bunch! also because i like knowing Exactly What’s Going On At All Times in relation to my boundaries and ‘????’ is.. unhelpful.
I just went down an Esther Perel rabbit hole after reading Sarah’s comment, and it was so good and so fascinating. Highly recommended.
Love her podcast too.
This is so good, thank you! Coming from the perspective of my longest term relationship being with a cis guy, and me a cis woman, there’s another thing that happens in that situation. I’m sure I’m not alone (although in my experience hetero people don’t talk about their sex lives like queer folk do, so I’m not totally sure).
Although almost all of the sexual desire was sapped from our relationship a long time ago, and to be honest it was never super sexual, I am happy to oblige my partner. Just the mechanics of P in V sex make it so the willing V partner can say, “sure, why the heck not,” slap on some coconut oil and the P partner can have an orgasm and they can move on with life. This happens frequently here. I (the V partner) just help myself to an orgasm another time and am happy to have just helped someone I love feel good. If I want more I request and if he’s feeling it he will oblige.
The reason I mention this kind of awful phenomenon is because it can skew the statistics. Having kind of perfunctory one sided sex might be fairly common with straights. Just because they are technically having sex doesn’t mean it’s any good. If your anatomy requires you to actually pay attention to your partner and make sure they get what they want out of sex, you might just not have sex vs. having blah P & V relations.
Sorry that was probably very depressing. Throw it into Straight People Watch.
My other experience is that I was so afraid of LBD with my parter before this one that we had a huge fight when sex started to slow down in frequency. I was with her for a few years and it slowed to 1x a week. I was all bent out of shape about it.
Incidentally in my current relationship of many many years, which is not a lesbian relationship, we have been at 1x a week the entire relationship, maybe occasionally twice a week or every other week. And I never got bent out of shape about bed death. So I think this stupid concept gives people extra relationship baggage that none of us need.
This is such a helpful and interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing!
Yep!!! This was totally true in my experience and was a weird thing to think about once i entered LTRs with cis women — I realized how much sex was maintained in relationships with cis men that had lost their spark because actually having PIV sex could be a 5-minute situation in which they’d get off and I would be happy for them for doing that and not particularly concerned about my own needs or whether or not we were connecting.
Definitely. I don’t think it’s 100% bad. I actually really love (and get off on) helping other people feel good and did before I was in a hetero situation too. But it can turn into something that’s functionally “bed death” even though you’re still technically having sex.
vanessa, i love you.
it is so very mutual <3
“don’t be mad that we communicate well so when our sex life dies we still have processing skills vs. straight people who don’t know how to communicate so when their sex life dies it’s just called “a breakup,” yes I said it, I warned you I’m wine drunk”
vanessa, i just
i love you like a lot
jeanna i love you a lot a lot too!! HOW FORTUNATE FOR US BOTH!
I definitely think calling it lesbian bed death is unnecessarily dramatic. But re: Riese’s comments, I wonder how much hormones play into spontaneous desire? I am an afab person now on testosterone and yes it has made me more horny, but the biggest difference is that now I spontaneously get horny while like, eating cereal or driving to work. Before T, I had a high sex drive, but I really only got turned on if something prompted it
LBD: This so *is* a thing. It was commonly well-understood in the 90s in the queer women’s community, in Brooklyn at least. Back then we used to spend entire weekends in bed, only rising to get water and nutrients and go pee. This may be something that other (non-LBT women) couples experience, but there’s more of it around in this community. And I’ve been living with this for years now, but since I came out trans in 2016 it’s awful, because once trans people come out, they tend to want to go have all the sex they didn’t get to have when they were hiding, and that feels like me. (Dr. Laura Jacobs explained this at Philadelphia last year, at least I know what it is.) My wife is all for me finding friends w/ benefits, or without, I just have trouble meeting people at all.
This is really horrible, I’m all churned up inside, I’m not sure how to make it just stop. It’s this big awful thing. We haven’t had sex since October of 2016. We were on a trip to a conference, I kept hoping I’d get lucky at another conference but it never happened. We don’t kiss, we peck, and we hug some but don’t cuddle. I don’t push it and she doesn’t want to, I guess. I feel so fucking undesirable it’s crushing me. I’m crying. I write a lot about all kinds of horrible shit that happened to me and it doesn’t make me get all teary-eyed, but this does. It makes me feel old, and ugly, and ghosted. I keep getting ghosted. Okc is horrible. Everyone who walks around with an app full of people who want to meet you isn’t going to prioritize me, who will like maybe a handful of people on Okc in a month and get up the courage to write to one or two. I heard from someone. I haven’t heard from her again. And so on.
And I am tired of trying. I’m a seriously shy introverted femme and it’s extraordinarily difficult for me to expose myself to rejection over and over, or not even overt rejection as much as either getting ghosted for reasons they don’t want to tell me, or because they simply have a couple dozen other new people on Okc (or Grindr or whatever) who want to meet them, whereas I have one or two. I need them far more than they need me. And I don’t even expect to ever meet someone on Okc who I’ll actually end up having sex with, if only once or twice, although of course I’m in theory open to the idea. I just need more friends right now. I just need someone to watch scary stuff with me like *Handmaid’s Tale*, even skipping the torture and biblical justifications etc. Just watch and rewatch the Samira Wiley parts. All of *Supergirl*, for example, would be okay in terms of pain and terror onscreen, that’s about my level of tolerance.
This kind of thing hurts deep and doesn’t go away. We’re non-monogamous in theory, we used to joke: we had no objection if one wanted to have sex with someone else, etc., but in practice it was all we could do to fit sex into our daily lives. Then after a while there was no sex to fit in. It became something that happened once or twice a year. Now, not at all. And I’ve been to this all-women-&-trans S&M party, it’s once a month in Brooklyn and I went once, I’m way shy plus some near misses mean I haven’t been back. I’m a total nerd and really bad at reading social cues. And I’m sixty now, and I don’t imagine anyone looking for some kind of a trans unicorn is thinking of someone who looks like me. I’m not sure anyone at all is looking for someone like me.
So, I just haven’t gotten around to it for many months, I plan to go but then it doesn’t happen. It would be great if my wife wanted to come with me, she said once she’d love to. But it hasn’t happened and it probably never will. I have to get on top of all this. I am not sure how. We still love each other so much. We always will. That’s the thing that makes this so hard. She just doesn’t want to have sex.
Ok I LOVE this article. This issue has scared the living daylights out of me throughout 20 years of relationships, but reading everyone’s experiences, similar and dissimilar, is fascinating and educational and somehow also a little soothing/calming.